Vulnerability and the ethics of environmental enhancement

Abstract

In this paper, following the taxonomy developed by Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds of different sources and states of vulnerability, I claim that wild animals are inherently and situationally vulnerable. This is because they can experience suffering as a response to certain internal and external states and have a high exposure to, and a low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. From this it follows that we have a moral obligation to support and assist individuals who are occurrently vulnerable and to reduce the risk of dispositional vulnerabilities becoming occurrent in the future, by endorsing some form of what I call ‘environmental enhancement’. Finally, I pay critical attention to how to prevent interventions aimed at ameliorating vulnerability from paradoxically generating pathogenic vulnerabilities.